Revision as of 11:07, August 11, 2006

This page is an official policy on OrthodoxWiki. It has wide acceptance among editors and is considered a standard that all users should follow. If you are part of the administration, please feel free to update this page as needed, but make sure that changes you make to this policy really do reflect OrthodoxWiki's perspective before you make them.

All material on OrthodoxWiki is by default released under a dual GDFL-Creative Commons license. For other licenses (especially for images), see Help:Image licenses.

As of November 22, 2005, we are tweaking our licensing structure a little bit. Previously, the default copyright for all OrthodoxWiki materials was a Creative Commons (CC) License (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0).

There are a couple of problems with this arrangement, not least that it in incompatible with (and thus violates the terms of) the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) used by Wikipedia. This causes complications because a number of our articles began as Wikipedia imports.

So, we are planning to move to a dual license. Every edit that is made will be by default licensed under both the GFDL as well as a revised Creative Commons license (Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5). Naturally, this will not apply to material that was previously released under a different license (unless we have explicit permission otherwise), such as the content taken from Wikipedia or edits made before November 22, 2005. This will also not apply to any material that is submitted to OrthodoxWiki under other copyright terms, such as most of our images and some of our articles. If you would like to apply this license retroactively to include all of your edits, please add the acceptrevised template to your user page. (You can do this simply by adding "{{acceptrevised}}" to your page.)

The main change as far as the Creative Commons license is concerned, is that the new license allows restricted commercial use of the material. The GFDL already allows this, and we see no reason to make the CC license more restrictive. Furthermore, we do not anticipate anybody making big money off of OrthodoxWiki content. If someone can earn something by publishing it commercially according to the terms of one of these licenses, we will simply be happy that the content is being used and that OrthodoxWiki is being publicized. Furthermore, we are still requiring authors of derivative works to "Share-Alike", which means they cannot restrict similar copying of the edits they make from OrthodoxWiki articles.

We would also like to make sure that the barriers to reprinting material here are not too high. Right now, to be safe, reprinting material requires contacting all of the individual contributors and obtaining their permission to use their materials and crediting them individually. We'd like to change it so that consent is implied and the requirement for attribution can be fullfilled more simply.

Here's an imagined scenario: A number of people dedicate their time and know-how to create a splendid series of articles on Orthodox monasticism in South Africa. A priest in Zimbabwe wants to reprint these articles for the edification of the faithful. Now, instead of getting permission from or citing every single contributor, this priest can simply cite collective authorship at OrthodoxWiki, and refer to the CC by-sa license. Also, he doesn't have to be shy about trying to recoup his printing costs, or even earning a small profit to help reward him for him time and effort. If he wants to polish up the articles, and add some local flavor, he is free to do so, but his revision must likewise by published under the same license. This way, others can benefit from his work just as he benefitted from those before him.

To this end, the “click-through language’’ (what is agreed to everytime a user clicks “Save Page